Amazon soars, Apple sinks 🎢

Welcome back to the Day Trading newsletter 📈

The Fed held rates and got punished with the market's worst day in over a year, Iran kept lobbing missiles, and then Big Tech earnings split the market clean down the middle.

Somehow, all three major indexes still finished the week higher, and the Dow notched its fourth straight winning month.

Let’s get into it 👇️ 

📅 Monday 8/3 — ISM Manufacturing PMI (10am ET): First read on factory activity for July, expected to tick up to 54 from 53.3. With inflation still hot, the prices-paid component matters as much as the headline.

📅 Monday 8/3 — Palantir earnings (after close): The first big AI-software test of the week. Watch commercial growth and government contract momentum.

📅 Tuesday 8/4 — AMD + SpaceX earnings (after close): SpaceX delivers its first report as a public company, with revenue expected near $6.8 billion. AMD's data-center and MI350 GPU numbers are a key read on AI chip demand.

📅 Wednesday 8/5 — ISM Services PMI (10am ET): The services sector is the bulk of the economy — and its prices index feeds directly into the September hike debate. ADP private payrolls land the same morning at 8:15am ET.

📅 Friday 8/7 — July jobs report (8:30am ET): The biggest data point before the Fed's live September meeting. A hot print pushes the hawks' case; a soft one buys the doves time.

🔼 The 30-year Treasury yield surged to 5.249% Friday, its highest level since 2007, as some Fed officials openly called for rate hikes. The 10-year jumped to 4.71%. Long-term yields set mortgage and corporate borrowing costs, so the bond market is effectively tightening whether the Fed moves or not.

🚢 Iran's Revolutionary Guard said it struck two tankers transiting the Strait of Hormuz under U.S. military escort on Friday. Four other tankers turned back. WTI rose more than 1% to $84.67 and Brent settled at $90.12 — though oil still fell over 5% for the week on earlier de-escalation hopes.

⛽️ Exxon and Chevron posted a combined $26.5 billion in quarterly profit as the Iran war squeezed global oil supply. Chevron's $12.2 billion was the largest quarterly profit in its history — nearly five times last year's figure. Crude averaged $92.45 a barrel from April through June, up 27% from Q1.

 
📉 The Fed's preferred inflation gauge finally cooled: PCE inflation eased to 3.7% in June from 4.1% in May. Prices fell 0.1% on the month as a temporary truce with Iran dragged energy costs lower, and core PCE ran at 3.3%. The catch: oil has since rebounded, so the relief may not last.

🔒️ A flaw in Coldcard hardware wallets has let attackers drain nearly $89 million in bitcoin from more than 4,500 addresses since Thursday. A 2021 firmware bug generated wallet keys with weak randomness, letting thieves simply recompute them. Cold storage is supposed to be the safe option — check your firmware.

🔻 Reddit sank about 11% despite beating estimates with $805 million in revenue, up 61% year over year. The culprit: management flagged "choppy" Google search referrals, reviving fears about Reddit's reliance on Google for new users. Eight straight quarters of 60%+ growth couldn't outweigh one sentence in a shareholder letter.

🔽 Coinbase fell about 5% after missing Wall Street estimates for a third straight quarter. Revenue came in at $1.22 billion versus the roughly $1.3 billion expected, with a net loss of $359.5 million. The company skipped the traditional earnings call entirely, taking questions in a live AMA on X instead.

📊 Strategy went a fifth straight week without buying bitcoin, instead raising $544.5 million in stock sales and building a $3.75 billion cash reserve. Michael Saylor's firm still holds 843,775 BTC, but the pause — plus recent bitcoin sales — marks a striking shift for the market's most famous perma-buyer.

Friday delivered the sharpest one-day verdict on Big Tech's AI race yet.

Amazon rocketed 15% to close at $271.58 (its biggest single-day gain since April 2012) after AWS revenue grew 37% to $42.2 billion, the cloud unit's fastest growth in 18 quarters.

Total revenue rose 20% to $200.6 billion, and operating income hit $27.5 billion, well above forecasts.

Apple went the other way, sliding 7.2% (its worst day in 16 months) after Services ($30.74 billion vs. $31.22 billion expected) and Greater China ($18.8 billion vs. $19.5 billion expected) both missed, and CEO Tim Cook warned that the memory-chip shortage will bite harder into the current quarter's forecast.

Investors are no longer buying "AI exposure" as a monolith. They're sorting winners from losers, line item by line item.

The three biggest cloud providers were the week's winners: Alphabet, Amazon and Microsoft added nearly $1.5 trillion in combined market value this week, with Microsoft alone gaining more than $600 billion.

Meanwhile, Apple shed over $350 billion and Meta lost more than $85 billion as investors questioned their AI payoff.

The message: massive capex is fine (Amazon raised its 2026 spending plan to roughly $220 billion and was rewarded for it) as long as the revenue shows up alongside it.

What to watch: 

• The sorting continues this week when AMD, Palantir, and newly public SpaceX report.

• With the Fed's September meeting live for a possible hike, the market's tolerance for expensive AI bets with distant payoffs could get thinner from here.

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⚠️ Disclaimer: Not financial advice. Do your research before making any trades.